Here’s a view from inside the cooler! We made the cooler a priority in our our first year. It helped tremendously.

We did have a couple precarious weeks of shuffling produce around regular-sized refrigerators. Ideally, we would have built this a little earlier in the season to make life easier, but we were pretty strapped for time. Our friend Molly helped us tremendously through those weeks.

This DIY cooler costs a lot less than a commercial cooler. We hope it’s big enough to store our future harvests as we expand our production. We plan to build a similar smaller cooler, a “warm walk-in,” to store squash and tomatoes, which prefer controlled climate but at a different temperature.